The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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      ‘I have a set of tasks to carry out, whatever you and I could be, Lord Farenze,’ she reminded him and rose to her feet.

      ‘So Lady Chloe Thessaly puts her disguise back on to be Mrs Wheaton again. I’d be more impressed by that if you didn’t look so thoroughly kissed and rumpled, madam. I suggest you rearrange the housekeeper if you want her to be taken seriously,’ he said with a look that admitted he was being harsh. ‘Go on then, leave me with Virginia’s missive to soothe my pride. Rebuild your defences for me to knock down again, because I will find the weak points in them and tear them away.’

      Not sure if it was a threat or a promise, she shook her head and felt the unfamiliar weight of her hair about her shoulders with a distracted frown. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said numbly then gathered up her scattered hairpins and discarded cap. The words I love you almost got on to her tongue and into the evening air, but it would be unfair to say it and walk away, so she bit her lip and went.

      * * *

      ‘Read your letter,’ she’d said. Luke opened his last missive from Virginia with less reverence than he would have half an hour ago, then held it unseeingly instead of reading.

      How could he take in Virginia’s words as if nothing much had happened? Impossible to let her words glide into meaning now, instead of dancing across the page as if written in code. All he could think of was her—Lady Chloe Thessaly; Mrs Wheaton; the woman who kissed him like a heated dream. The dream he’d refused to have for so long.

      He wondered what life would be like if he wasn’t a coward. Pamela had treated him like a wooden effigy without feelings, but why had he let her spoil so much that could be good and right about his life once she was no more than a bitter memory? If he’d forced his way through Chloe’s barriers when she was young and wild and daring, they could have been happy together for years.

      Instead of seizing the happiness he could have, he’d clung to his wrongs. Pamela said he was a cold-hearted martinet, so he’d become one—not with his daughter, but to the world outside the castle walls. He was nineteen when he made that disastrous marriage, twenty when Pamela taunted him with what she’d done and walked away. His hands fisted involuntarily, but he made himself open them, then laid Virginia’s precious last letter aside until he was fit to read it again.

      It had come to him when he kissed Chloe that his future felt right with her in it and those wasted years weighed heavy. He might have had Chloe at his side, could have seen his second wife flourish and flower as their closeness grew, if he wasn’t such a fool. Even when she eyed him hungrily as a half-starved wildcat at a banquet ten years ago, he had not taken his advantage.

      He’d been such a boy, that unformed youth Pamela took in lieu of the rich, titled and sophisticated man of the world she’d really wanted. The hurting youth she made of him went on lashing out every time his precious isolation was in danger. It really was high time he grew up, he decided, with a wry smile to admit to himself that he’d left it a little late.

      ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he told the small and exquisite marriage portrait of Virginia and Virgil that hung in their favourite room, ‘and any other cliché I can think of to get me where you two sat so smugly contented with each other all those years ago.’

      For a moment it seemed as if the lovers took their love-locked gazes off each other, focused on him with mocking approval and whispered, ‘About time.’

      ‘Must be more tired than I thought,’ he muttered as he blinked and looked again.

      No, they were as they’d always been, so absorbed in each other he could imagine the exasperated artist demanding they look outwards and let him do what he was here for time after time, until he gave up and painted what he saw instead of what they did. Of course they were still lost in each other’s eyes, every idea in their heads focused on one another, painted lovers caught in an endless moment of loving and wanting each other.

      ‘A trick of the firelight,’ he assured himself and his great-uncle and aunt’s painted likenesses, then bent down to light a taper from the glowing fire to light a branch of candles. ‘You’ll have to do better than that if it wasn’t,’ he told the oblivious lovers, glad Chloe had closed the door behind her so there was no risk of being overheard talking to a picture.

      ‘She might not have me anyway,’ he argued with a stretched canvas and a few layers of expensive paint. ‘Little wonder if she’s curious about what she missed and responds to me like a man’s wildest fantasy. Maybe she wants to know what her sister risked so much for.’

      He could feel a huge gap opening up inside him at the very idea he might love Lady Chloe and she could not love him back. He shook his head to try to reason it away, or accept the full echoing emptiness of that future.

      ‘You could give me a clue,’ he told the youthful image of Virginia with so little of her attention on the world beyond her lover’s gaze.

      It seemed to his tired mind Virgil spoke this time, ‘You did tell the boy to read that letter, not use it to line his hat with, didn’t you, love?’

      Since he’d be a fool not to, he did as he might have been bid, if his conversation with two dead lovers wasn’t impossible.

      * * *

      ‘Lady Farenze was very specific, my lord,’ the portly little lawyer said a few minutes later and took off his spectacles to peer at Luke with apparently mild eyes. ‘We went over her will in minute detail six months ago and I can confirm that her ladyship was of sound mind and very clear about her wishes.’

      ‘I dare say, but this scheme of hers is ridiculous. No, it’s beyond ridiculous. You must find a way to set this part of Lady Virginia’s will aside and allow me administer the estate instead of Lady Chloe.’

      ‘Lady Virginia was very specific—either the whole of her will is proved and enacted or none of it. Naturally you will receive this house and the Farenze Lodge Estate under the terms of your great-uncle’s will, but the rest of the provisions of her ladyship’s will must be rendered null and void. Her personal fortune will then go to her blood kin as her legal heirs. By the time it has been fought over and split between all the DeMayes and the Revereux family entitled to a share it will do little good to anyone, but if you fight this document, that is what must happen.’

      Luke swore as he paced the room angrily, raging at the devil over the few words Virginia left him to fume over echoing about in his head.

      Darling Luke,

      Your task for the next few months is to track down Verity Thessaly’s father. I only wish for your happiness, my dear boy, but I suggest you start out by visiting Crowdale’s Scottish estates to look for clues to the man’s identity.

      All my love,

      Great-Aunt Virginia

       Chapter Fourteen

      So that was his last letter from Virginia; a couple of lines and a cryptic reference? Now he was supposed to do what Chloe least wanted him to do—dig into her sister’s past as carelessly as if excavating potatoes. Curse it; he’d always thought Virginia loved him, despite his faults and managing ways. Now she’d left him an impossible task and expected him to be happy at the end of it. Chloe would curse him up hill and down dale, then refuse to have anything more to do СКАЧАТЬ